Heart failure is a debilitating disease in which abnormal function of the heart leads to inadequate blood flow to fulfill the needs of the tissues and organs of the body. Typically, the heart loses propulsive power because the cardiac muscle loses capacity to stretch and contract. Often, the ventricles do not adequately fill with blood between heartbeats and the valves regulating blood flow become leaky, allowing regurgitation or back-flow of blood. The impairment of arterial circulation may deprive vital organs of oxygen and nutrients. Fatigue, weakness and the inability to carry out daily tasks may result. Not all heart failure patients suffer debilitating symptoms immediately. Some may live actively for years. Yet, with few exceptions, the disease is relentlessly progressive. As heart failure progresses, it tends to become increasingly difficult to manage. Even the compensatory responses it triggers in the body may themselves eventually complicate the clinical prognosis. For example, when the heart attempts to compensate for reduced cardiac output, it adds cardiac muscle mass causing the ventricles to grow in volume in an attempt to pump more blood with each heartbeat, i.e. to increase the stroke volume. This places a still higher demand on the heart's oxygen supply. If the oxygen supply falls short of the growing demand, as it often does, further injury to the heart may result, typically in the form of myocardial ischemia or myocardial infarction. The additional muscle mass may also stiffen the heart walls to hamper rather than assist in providing cardiac output. Often, electrical and mechanical dyssynchronies develop within the heart such that the various chambers of the heart no longer beat in a synchronized manner, degrading overall cardiac function. A particularly severe form of heart failure is congestive heart failure (CHF) wherein the weak pumping of the heart or compromised filling leads to build-up of fluids in the lungs and other organs and tissues.
Many patients susceptible to CHF, particularly the elderly, have pacemakers, ICDs or other implantable medical devices implanted therein, or are candidates for such devices. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide techniques for detecting and tracking CHF using such devices. One particularly effective parameter for detecting and tracking CHF is cardiac pressure, particularly LAP, i.e. the blood pressure within the left atrium of the patient. Reliable detection or estimation of LAP would not only permit the implanted device to track CHF for diagnostic purposes but to also control therapies applied to address CHF such as cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). CRT seeks to normalize asynchronous cardiac electrical activation and the resultant asynchronous contractions by delivering synchronized pacing stimulus to the ventricles using pacemakers or ICDs equipped with biventricular pacing capability. The pacing stimulus is typically synchronized so as to help to improve overall cardiac function. This may have the additional beneficial effect of reducing the susceptibility to life-threatening tachyarrhythmias. CRT and related therapies are discussed in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,643,546 to Mathis, et al., entitled “Multi-Electrode Apparatus And Method For Treatment Of Congestive Heart Failure”; U.S. Pat. No. 6,628,988 to Kramer, et al., entitled “Apparatus And Method For Reversal Of Myocardial Remodeling With Electrical Stimulation”; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,512,952 to Stahmann, et al., entitled “Method And Apparatus For Maintaining Synchronized Pacing”.
Reliable estimates of LAP provided by a pacemaker or ICD would also allow the dosing of heart failure medications (such as diuretics) to be properly titrated so as to minimize the number of episodes of acute heart failure decompensation. Another advantage to providing reliable estimates of LAP is that physicians are typically familiar with LAP values. Hence, LAP estimates could be provided to the physician via diagnostic displays, which the physicians can then readily interpret.
However, LAP is a difficult parameter to detect since it is not clinically appealing to place a blood pressure sensor directly in the left atrium due to the chronic risk of thromboembolic events, as well as risks associated with the trans-septal implant procedure itself. Accordingly, various techniques have been developed for estimating LAP based on other parameters that can be more safely sensed by a pacemaker or ICD. In this regard, a number of techniques have been developed that use electrical impedance signals to estimate LAP. For example, impedance signals can be sensed along a sensing vector passing through the left atrium, such as between an electrode mounted on a left ventricular (LV) lead and another electrode mounted on a right atrial (RA) lead. The sensed impedance is affected by the blood volume inside the left atrium, which is in turn reflected by the pressure in the left atrium. Accordingly, there is a correlation between the sensed impedance and LAP, which can be exploited to estimate LAP and thereby also track CHF. See, for example, U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/787,884 of Wong et al., entitled, “Tissue Characterization Using Intracardiac Impedances with an Implantable Lead System,” filed Mar. 31, 2006, and U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/558,101, 11/557,851, 11/557,870, 11/557,882 and 11/558,088, each entitled “Systems and Methods to Monitor and Treat Heart Failure Conditions”, of Panescu et al. See, also, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/558,194, by Panescu et al., entitled “Closed-Loop Adaptive Adjustment of Pacing Therapy based on Cardiogenic Impedance Signals Detected by an Implantable Medical Device.” Particularly effective techniques for calibrating impedance-based techniques are set forth in: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/559,235, by Panescu et al., entitled “System and Method for Estimating Cardiac Pressure Using Parameters Derived from Impedance Signals Detected by an Implantable Medical Device.”
It would be desirable to develop LAP estimation techniques that do not rely only on impedance but instead, or additionally, exploit intracardiac electrogram (IEGM) signals commonly sensed by pacemakers and ICDs, and it is to that end that certain aspects of the present invention are directed. Also, it would be desirable to provide techniques for automatically adjusting and controlling CRT and other forms of cardiac rhythm management therapy in response to estimated LAP so as to, e.g., mitigate the effects of CHF, and it is to that end that other aspects of the present invention are directed.